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In the 45 hours that followed Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final, much of the talk around the city was the the Bruins were well on their way to their second Stanley Cup, as if the Chicago Blackhawks were going to lie down and hand it to them.

It didn’t take long for the Blackhawks to squash any and all talk of this being an easy or short series.

The Blackhawks scored just 6:48 into the game and never trailed for the full 69:51 of Game 4, eventually skating away with a 6-5 victory and a 2-2 series tie. Though the Bruins showed championship character by clawing back to tie the game on three separate occasions, they were sunk by uncharacteristic mistakes and sloppy defense. Against a team as potent and talented as Chicago, that type of lapse is almost always going to cost a team a chance at winning.

“I don’t think we played our best game tonight,” head coach Claude Julien said. “A lot of different reasons — I think our decision-making wasn’t very good at times. I didn’t think we were moving the puck as well as we had been in the past. It was certainly a tough outing for us tonight.”

The errors began in the first period, with the Bruins on a gift of a power play thanks to a weak penalty call on Johnny Oduya for interference. But it was Tyler Seguin who did the gift-wrapping, failing to be strong on the puck, turning it over and giving the Blackhawks a 2-0n-1 shorthanded opportunity. Brandon Saad passed to Michal Handzus, who fought through a trip to ring a shot off the post and in to give the Blackhawks an early lead.